


Left with His Hands

by nicasio_silang



Category: The Mindy Project
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-22
Updated: 2014-09-22
Packaged: 2018-02-18 09:26:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,049
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2343452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nicasio_silang/pseuds/nicasio_silang
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There’s no moisturizer in the apocalypse, Danny.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Left with His Hands

**Author's Note:**

> I'm hoping to update this every week or so. 
> 
> Warnings for the entire story, though not necessarily this part: gore, violence, animal death, character death, outdated pop culture references. 
> 
> This is for Anna, who brought this on herself.

_A man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river_  
                     _but then he’s still left_  
 _with the river. A man takes his sadness and throws it away_  
 _but then he’s still left with his hands._  
― Richard Siken, _Crush_

 

“Hey, do you want to have sex?”

“What?” He cracks an eye open. Mindy’s across the room, sitting by the fire, bouncing both knees like a kid who has to pee.

“Sex, do you want to have it, do you want to do it, do you want to have sex?”

He opens the other eye. “With you?”

“No, with the cow, Danny. Yes, with me, do you want to have sex with me?”

He squints. He looks up at the ceiling. He props himself up on his elbows and rolls his neck a little this way, then that way. Throws an eyebrow at her.

“Is the cow an option?”

“Ugh, whatever, you’re the worst.” Both knees stop bouncing, then one starts up again. She pokes at the fire with a stick.

“What brought this on exactly?” He’s awake now, so he sits up. Waves a lazy hand up and down to indicate himself. “Aside from the obvious.” She lets out some air from behind her teeth.

“Don’t flatter yourself, buddy. I’m just super pre-menstrual, and it makes me really horny, and, you know.” Abbreviated jazz hands. “Here we are.”

“Can’t you just…?” He makes a little whisking motion near his crotch.

“Seriously? I’m the literal last woman on the planet, I just offered to fuck you, and you want me to, what, go masturbate in the corner while you sleep?”

“I could just turn around.”

“Oh my god.”

“I mean, I’m not gonna watch, that’s not really my thing, so…”

“Just shut up. Shut up and go back to sleep.”

“Wait, it’s not my turn?”

“No, it’s like, it’s midnight or something, you have two more hours.”

“You _woke me up_ for this?”

“Apparently! So maybe you should get back to sleep so you’re not bitching about being tired all day!”

“Unbelievable.” He settles back down. The bed creaks. It’s just a bunch of two-by-fours across a rickety frame. “Unfucking believable.”

The night is breathing outside. Frogs, insects, more frogs. The fire pops and hisses. The denim of Mindy’s jeans scratches against the stone of the fireplace as she moves her leg.

Sleeping in shifts is a habit leftover from those first chaotic months getting out of the cities and the suburbs. She takes the middle watch, and he takes a shorter first and third. He said it was because that’s just how his circadian rhythms work, but he actually just wanted to watch her during that first shift. If she turned in her sleep, it’d be easier to take care of. It’s been a quiet couple days in this cabin, though. There’s the cow, there’s an outhouse, and they’ve only had to kill a handful of stragglers. Neither of them has said it yet, but this might be a decent place to stay a while.

Danny sighs and rolls over, his head resting in the crook of his arm.

“We don’t have any condoms,” he says.

Mindy gives him an aggressive shrug. “You could pull out.”

He halfway nods and falls asleep.

 

1 A.M. that first night, barreling through Jersey City in a stolen ambulance, Mindy stops CPR on the woman they’d hauled into the back, peels off her latex gloves, leans over to the front window to tell Danny she’s gone, sees an arch of lights far ahead, and realizes that he’s heading for the Bayonne Bridge.

“Hey,” she bangs on the partition. “Hey!”

“It’ll only take a minute!” He calls back.

She can’t see his face, just his temple, his sweat-slicked sideburn, his hands white-knuckling at 10 o’clock and 2 o’clock.

“That is definitely not true,” she says. He doesn’t answer.

There’s a lot of traffic on the road, most of it heading the other way. Motorcycles nipping in and out between cars, cars dropping onto the shoulder to make an extra lane, everyone with their windows up and their eyes on their rearview. A lot of drivers in the opposite lanes have their brights on, the light glances off the ambulance’s windshield with a violence. There’s a sudden flurry of tail lights up ahead, horns, shouts that carry farther than they should. Mindy slaps her palm on the window again.

“Danny! We can’t go this way. Hey!”

“She’s right across the bridge, okay! She’s, she’s like five minutes after the bridge.”

He pushes on until he can’t, then they’re idling behind a Hyundai full of panicked teenagers in formal wear. He flips on the lights and sirens which gets them two more car lengths forward, then nothing. The shouting from ahead is getting closer, more frantic.

“Back up!” She yells at him. “Just… There’s no way through, just back up!”

He’s breathing so hard that she can hear it through the glass. He tilts his head back, knocks it on the wall between them. She can see his adam’s apple jump. Then he turns, looks her in the eye, takes a breath, and tells her to stay inside. He’s out and running before he can hear what she calls him.

Outside there’s the sound of tires spinning, an acrid smell in the air, the ambulance reds soaking everything over and over. Other people have gotten out of their cars; a man nearby is standing on the hood of his sedan, trying to see ahead. There’s a patter, then a crescendo as a crowd sprints against the direction of traffic, away from the bridge, parting and reforming and shouting in a wave ahead of themselves, _Go, go go!_ A handful pause to hover by the ambulance hoping for something to happen or someone to tell them what to do. They find only the body inside, and hurry on.

Mindy finds Danny limping on a sprained ankle and hauling himself forward from car to car, bellowing at people rushing past.

“I’m walking here, asshole!” He stops to lean against a Volvo, she catches up and grabs his arm. “I told you to stay in the van.”

“Yeah, good work, Sam Neill in Jurassic Park. You’re gonna get trampled to death out here, and…” Mindy looks up ahead where the lights of cars have started to go out and the individual movements in the crowd are becoming erratic, convulsive. “We can’t go this way.”

For a moment, his eyes widen and he takes in the scene.

“Okay,” he starts. “Okay, so we take the Verrazano.”

“Whoa, no, you wanna get to Brooklyn in this cluster?”

He shakes her off and takes another few steps forward. “So take the van, get outta here, I'm going across.”

He makes it fifteen feet before getting bowled over by a panicked, mustachioed man on a scooter. While Danny’s squirming on the ground, rearranging his limbs underneath himself, Mindy says she’s sorry, then stabs him with a needle full of tranquilizer.

“What the..?” He spins, drops back onto his ass. “What the hell did you do?”

“It’s fine, it’s fine,” she gets him on his feet, leans him on her shoulder. “It’s 5mg, I’m sorry, it’s fine.”

He curses her. Thoroughly. The disorientation and fatigue washes over him fast, but it’s long enough to hobble back to the ambulance, and for her to push him up into the passenger seat. His head knocks against the door frame. Mindy winces.

“Sorry,” she says again. “Keep your head up, okay? Just, yeah, keep it up, you’re good.”

Mindy jogs around to the back and closes the doors, comes back around to the driver’s side. It’s bigger than anything she’s ever driven, but at least the seat is close enough to the pedals. Something outside is getting closer, the crowd is getting thinner. She leans over to buckle Danny in. His head is lolling, his cheeks wet, he’s fading.

“Don’t leave her. Min, don’t leave my Ma.”

Mindy puts it in reverse and forces a way out. She stops two hours later in Englewood to take the body out of the back.

 

The cow is dead. They’d tied it to the same tree half a dozen times before, but it rained overnight and the cow must have slipped, fallen on its back down the little incline, and not been able to get up. It has a broken leg and the rope around its neck is stretched tight. It’s nobody’s fault.

“You’re sure you didn’t hear anything?” He asks again.

“Did I stutter? No. No, I didn’t hear anything because it didn’t happen on my watch.”

“Oh, so it happened on mine?”

“I don’t see anyone else here! Oh, except for my dead cow.”

“ _Your_ dead cow?”

“Excuse you, whose idea was it to milk the cow?”

“And who actually did the milking?”

“You know what that does to my hands! There’s no moisturizer in the apocalypse, Danny.”

“You stole a $500 bottle of lotion during the first _day_ of the apocalypse!”

“It’s not stealing if everyone’s dead!”

“If everyone’s dead, then nobody cares how moist you are!”

This goes on for some time.

They cut the rope and drag the cow a few feet out of the mud. It’s October, but warm. Flies have started to gather. They’re everywhere these days. Mindy and Danny wave a few away. They stand and consider the cow.

“If we salt and dry all this meat, that’ll go a long way in the winter,” Danny says. It’s the first time they’ve talked like that; like the future is something inevitable.

“For real?” She says. He nods. He owns the collected Jack London.

“Do we have any salt?” She asks.

“There’s a shaker in the cabin.”

“I don’t think that’s…”

“No.”

“Yeah, that’s probably not enough.”

“No. Steaks, I guess?”

“Hell yeah.” Mindy pulls a knife from her belt, holds it point-up like a cartoon caveman waiting for dinner. “Which part is the steak?”

“Tcha, seriously?” Danny flicks a couple fingers at the cow. “It’s the… You know.”

Mindy stares at Danny. Danny stares at the cow. The cow, vacant-eyed, stares at the early morning sky.

“Is it the ass?”

“The ass?”

“Yeah, the, the rump,” he says.

“Okay, I’ve eaten a lot of steak, and I’m pretty sure it’s not the ass.”

“Look, it’s not like I go to my butcher and ask for a certain, for a quadrant or whatever. There’s a pile of steaks, you take a steak.” He plants his fists on his hips. “I mean, do we even, we don’t even have any A.1. so it’s, I don’t even see how, with the hide and the, we should just, it’s not like, and, you know. Sleeping dogs lie.”

“Jesus Christ, Castellano.” Mindy stabs the cow in the thigh and starts sawing. It takes a bit more elbow grease than most surgery, but she has an idea of the shape of the muscle. “I’m sick of Rice-A-Roni and Easy Mac.”

He watches for a minute, then goes into the cabin and comes back with another knife. Gets to work on the rump. Mindy snickers, he shoves her shoulder with his.

While they work, he asks “Aren’t you sad about this?”

“What, about the cow?”

“Yeah. I know we’ve seen a lot worse, but. You cried about that dog last week.”

“That was awful,” she says, and he agrees. “I guess that’s why I didn’t name the cow. I mean, I’m Hindu, but I’m hungry, you know?”

“Mhmm.”

A few minutes in, Mindy says, “Should we be skinning this first?” They try that. The chunks they cut out look nothing like steaks, more like bloody fists, but they keep cutting. It’s not long before the flies get too thick and they have to take their haul inside and try to get everything clean. All the meat goes into a pail. It’s a sloppy, red mess. Mindy grins down into it.

“It looks like sashimi,” she says.

“It looks like roadkill. You’re seriously off the Easy Mac?”

“I’d eat Easy Mac forever, if I could.” She lays a red arm across his shoulder. He flinches his face away from her hand. “But I’ve started to poop orange.”

“Please don’t touch me right now.”

“Rude.”


End file.
